Happy Birthday Bruce

Or: My belly-dancing debut


Once again it's been a long spell between posts. Since Mum's New Year wishes we've been keeping busy.

We've had a holiday in Germany (Frankfurt and Darmstadt to be precise) including setting off some fireworks for Silvester (New Year). Ooh eer (it's not illegal in Germany but I was scared by some of the antics we saw in the street!). Technically, we were on holiday before Mum's post but I didn't think anyone would be too picky. :)


I've travelled the country for a multitude of job interviews. I am extremely happy that one of them came through for me - even if finishing and moving is kinda stressful right now.

And then last weekend we celebrated Bruce's birthday (3rd February - just for the record). He'd booked a table at Zorbas Dance - a local restaurant that sounded a bit strange. Every Friday and Saturday  they have Party Night with a 3-course meal, belly-dancing, plate smashing and more.

Bruce and his dad picked me up from the train station. Happily this meant that I didn't have to take my backpack to the restaurant and I  didn't have to walk far in my party shoes. ;) Our waiter for the evening was fab - he started the night with "The soup is minestrone, the cheesecake is strawberry and the service is appalling." (It wasn't - although the MC was a big scary man!)

Food was tasty; I had halloumi, vege moussaka and cheesecake while Bruce had pork and mushrooms, lamb and mushrooms, and cheesecake and mushrooms (without the mushrooms).  After food the crazy began - or as the MC put it: "Action time!"

Although it was Bruce's birthday, I'm sure I spent more time doing silly things! Highlights - dancing on the table, dancing out one door and in the other, the in-house belly-dancer making Bruce join her for a wiggle (I have video!) and, of course, being a Zorba Girl.


As far as I can tell, the only requirements for being a Zorba Girl is that you're a girl and you're at the restaurant. :)  After a few 'moves' on the dance floor we were shepherded into a side room and allocated costumes. It was up to us whether we put it over our clothes or not, so Georgie and I decided to follow Bruce's philosophy: if you're going to do it, do it properly! We shimmied, we wobbled, we had a good laugh. It made me think it could be fun to find a class. And maybe next time there'll be less belly to wobble. :-)


T'was a good evening and definitely strange. I spent more time on my feet than I expected but the party shoes were surpisingly comfortable - at least until midnight. ;)

Bruce enjoyed himself, that was the main thing.


What's everyone else been up to?

*hugz* from us

Oscar's day on the farm

Hi everyone!

Yesterday we took Oscar to the miniature farm barn for a friend's 2-years-old birthday party. We dressed Os in some cold weather gear and he met a lot of animals for the very first time. The first part of the party was a bit of a tour and feed then it was pony ride time. All of the kids were too scared! Apart from Oscar, who sat on one for a little while. They were really cute ponies (I know what I want for my birthday!) and if they could have held my weight I would have been up there in no time as well! ;) Some of the little girls ended up putting hair clips into the pony's mane and leading it around the yard. Next was farm equipment time. I think Os enjoyed the tractor ride the most :) Then all of the kids went inside for some morning tea and cake. Oscar had his milk and then sat next to his little friend while he played with a serviette. It was a very cute party and it tired the little guy out. He fell asleep on the way home, so instead of trying to get him into the house without waking him we drove to the local shopping centre and Damien and I took turns going in to get lunch and eating in the car while Oscar slept (sneaky! :) We took heaps of photos, of course :)

Today we've had a quieter day. We went to the shopping centre for lunch and spent the rest of the day at home. Not sure what we'll do tomorrow. Probably enjoy the public holiday indoors with the heater on :)

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter everybody. I hope you all have had an enjoyable long weekend.

(more new photos over at flickr)

Oh, and big thanks to Auntie Dayna for the present, you can see him enjoying it here

Update from Adelaide

Hey guys.. well, some pretty big updates on the bandwagon. Jared, I hope you had a great birthday, we're still organising your present, maybe we'll give it to you when you visit. Ma n Pa, sorry to hear about the scary ER visit, but I'm glad Dad's on the mend again. A trip to Emergency is never a particularly pleasant experience.

As far as we are going, things are all pretty good. We've had Edith and Landon here for the last three weeks, and Rach arrived on Tuesday, but they headed home this morning. I know Oscar enjoyed seeing his grandparents and auntie, and we certainly appreciated an extra few pairs of hands to cook, clean up and occasionally take the baby so we could sleep :)

We took Oz to the beach on Saturday, which was great.. he slept pretty much the entire time. Then when we got home he was awake for some photos and a quick webcam chat with his other grandparents (and great-grandparent). I've put still more photos in the Oscar set on flickr.

I think the photos are generally 1200x1600, so if you want them at a bigger size to print just let me know.. the originals are more like 2500 x 1900. Mum and Dad, you do have that book to fill up after all ;)

That's about it from us. The time just seems to be flying by, it's hard to believe Oscar's a month old already. In no time he'll be eating all the food in the fridge and sleeping until noon :)

An evening at the theatre

Indulged our thespian hearts with a trip to Shakespeare's New Globe Theatre last night.

First: dinner at Harry's Bar in the city. Named after a famous cocktail (coquetier! eggcup!) bar in Venezia, Italia (Venice, Italy ;-)), Harry's of London shares, well, nothing with it's Italian namesake: it's a wine bar and restaurant, and the wine is Chilean, Australian and French rather than Italian. Nevertheless, the food was good: I had gnocchi (maybe Italiano!) with prawns; Dee tried the risotto (ooh, maybe it's more Italian than I gave it credit for). We ate with a friend of Dee's, her partner and two of her friends, and although we were both tired and didn't really like the idea of meeting new people just then, the night turned out okay.

Apparently Harry's in Venezia is really expensive; in London the bill was cut down to a more manageable size by a mid-week special: half price on the total bill if you have 2 courses. It was cheaper to have a main and dessert than to just have a main! Now that's a savings plan I could get into. Guess there is some good in the credit-crunch -- with all the bankers out of work, swanky places like Harry's has to let rabble like me in!

After dinner we wandered down towards the Thames and across one of the many bridges, the city beginning to sparkle as dusk mellowed to dark. Behind us, Wren's St. Paul's loomed ominously, whilst ahead the whitewashed walls and thatched roof of The Globe warmly invited us; it could've been the late 1600's, with both Globe and the great church rebuilt after the Great Fire of London. Or so I imagined.

We handed over our little cardboard tokens and shuffled up the wooden stairs to the top gallery, whereby we were afforded a near-birds-eye view down upon the stage the the players. We sat upon hard wooden benches, eschewing the hired cushions that those of less-hardy temperament (and posterior fortitude) felt necessary. Shortly the strains of a light tune played on lutes and horns signalled for quiet; a hush fell upon the crowd.

The play's the thing, you see, and the thing in this case was a jolly little tale, "The Merry Wives Of Windsor". A comedy, although I could not say whether t'were the skill of the Bard or that of the players that made it so; t'was a genuine laugh-out-loud, raucous comedy. Ooh, look thee upon these words! T'is like the particular, peculiar method of Shakespeare's own art hath soaked my brain; stewing in olde English forms of yore, it cannot help but express itself as I pen this journal!

So: perched upon hard benches (of birch or cedar) we watched a tale of clever wives, jealous husbands, bellicose doctors and rotund knights and laughed. Sooth: I could not decide whether Shakespeare so influenced English humour, or whether the comedic endeavours of Fawlty Towers and it's ilk were the influence for the players of this tale; in either case, you've not seen impotent fury until you've seen a skinny English gent in a badly-fitted wig first tempting a knight to make advances upon his wife, then cursing that she, in appearances at least, entertains such carnal ideas with said knight.

"CUCKOLD!!"

(Comments in thy best rendition of olde English please.)

A hydrocarbon- and hydroxl-fuelled weekend

Ah, back at work on a Monday morning. I'm enjoying my new job, actually - we even do things that could be considered ethical: enabling a micropayment economy in some of the poorer parts of the world, therefore boosting the economy and giving humans access to funds which they've never had before (e.g. in parts of Africa it's only something like 5% of people who have a bank account ... and we complain when they shut down our country branches!!).

Certainly better than letting rich people move their money around the world in order to let them stay rich ;-) and avoid the taxes that the rest of us poor working chumps have to pay. But enough subversive prosthelyitising! The point of this blog entry is to tell y'all what we did with our weekend - and it was all about friends, fermented grains and fossil fuels (and future fuel-cells, ahah!).

On Friday night we went to Chris's work drinks at a dingy little bar called the King's Arms in Holborn. Now, if that's where the King's soldier's spend their time, I'm surprised that Scotland didn't conquer England years ago - okay, a little unkind, it's a fun place to hang out but it's certainly shabby. Made all the more shabby-looking by Chris's entire office standing outside with pints of beer!

Strange phenomenon - when the sun comes out everybody is at a pub somewhere. And there are enough sprinkled throughout the city and surroundings, but they're always so full that people are spilling out the door, around the building, across the road in the local park. Strange, strange, strange.

So we had a couple of drinks and met a few new people Friday night. (Chris later went out clubbing with our mate Stolly, but Dee and I headed home for an early-ish night.) Saturday we caught up with another Aussie named Mark for lunch at the Union Tavern nearby. Bangers and mash for me, yum! After lunch we took Mark back home, and found Chris, Tina, Colleen and her friend Murray all having a wee party!

So many people in the back-patio area that we picked up the couch and took it out with us. Highlights: big chats about everything; more people turning up randomly; Chris bringing out a fern from his room, "because Planty was missing out"; yummy take-away Indian food (and lots of it).

On Sunday we got up early and headed to the British Motor Show (by way of Giraffe for pancakes and smoothies). So many cars! Trucks! Vans!



I walked around with Mark, a rev-head from way back. The coolest things in the first half of the building were the concept cars - with brightly glowing ninja-headlights, doors that swept up and back like wings and dashboards that looked like they belonged on the Starship Enterprise.

There were also a bunch of "green" cars - from low-emission petrol to hybrid (petrol and electric), diesel to biodiesel to other biofuel, fully electric with batteries or hydrogen fuel-cells. There were cars with recycled plastic bodies and solar panels, cars you plugged in to the wall at night, even a solar-powered bio-diesel Lotus Elise sports-car (in fetching brown-and-green forest colours).

I like seeing the electric cars, but most of them looked either a) ridiculous (square boxes on wheels, or bubbles that made the smart cars look sleek) or b) like something out of a Japanese cartoon (much better, but will they actually mass-manufacture them?).

Then it was onto the other side of the building for the petrol- and diesel-guzzling supercars -- Ferraris and Zondas and Lamboghinis and manufacturers I've never even heard of (but Mark's eyes glazed over and he drooled like Homer Simpson when he saw them). Lot's of things for going really fast - there were even a couple of motorcycles, so I was happy.

(Chris apparently sat in a Mini Cooper-D (for diesel), pretending that he really might buy one to the person minding the stand. Then when we finally caught up with him in the afternoon, he was genuinely considering it as a car to get sometime in the future! So I guess they did their job.)

Home to a barbeque (it's great, that patio!) and then we watched The Castle (classic) to try to introduce Colleen (Scottish) and Tina (English) to Australian culture. Not sure they got it :-).

Check it out now - the funk-soul brother

Well, nobody made any suggestions (probably a little bit late to ask I guess) but we still managed to have a nice four-day weekend. Stayed mostly at home on Thursday and Friday, played computer games (I got Warhammer 40,000: Dawn Of War for £10 from Amazon, and it runs flawlessly in Ubuntu/Linux). I had loooooooooong sleeps, whilst Dee actually went to the gym a couple of times (thus making me feel even lazier ... and lovin' it!). Saturday morning we all went to the gym (Dee, Chris and I) and then it was Fatboy Slim in Hyde Park in the afternoon-to-evening!

Actually, there were a few artists on a couple of different stages -- mostly electronic music, DJs, some rappers -- as it was part of the "O2 Wireless Festival". What wireless has to do with music, I don't know; perhaps it's because you can download music over the wifi network, or maybe a salute to the early days of radio? Whatever the case, Chris and I lined up outside the open-air venue -- a 2-metre wall surrounded an area the size of maybe 5 football fields (Hyde Park is huge).

Once we got inside, it was chaos. Well-meaning chaos, music-enjoying chaos, too-much-to-drink-before-lunchtime chaos. Plastic bottles littered the grass in about the same density as the human attendees; lines to the many bar-slash-tents stretched out across the lawn. Around the walls were stalls selling food and trinkets (glow-bracelets, necklaces, flashing lights, the usual dance-club paraphenalia), whilst strategically placed (and bad-smelling) mega-loos serviced the other end of the process. I imagine that most of London was once like a mega-loo -- plastic porta-potties in lines of tens and twenties, the humble pissoir-racks giving the men the previously-untried (and generally unwanted) experience of peeing whilst looking straight at another person (as the urinals were about chest-high and back-to-back). Eww.

Fatboy Slim came on at about 8:30pm (after Robyn, whose pop-style and catchy beats were stuck in my head for days afterwards). I hadn't seen pictures of him before, but he looks more like an English teacher than a popular musician. He spun his mixes, the crowds went wild, and we all bounced to old favourites (We've Come A Long Way, Baby) and new. (Chris made it his job -- no, his solemn calling -- to get as close to the front of the stage as possible. My tolerance for pushing through people was not so high, but I did follow him some of the way.)

When the show was over, a mass-exodus ensued. Expected, inevitable. I tagged along with Joyce and Luke (Chris's friends) whilst they raced to the exit, then came back to find Chris once they were off in Luke's car. The plan was to get a quiet drink somewhere -- the reality was the two of us walking south instead of north, then jumping on the train and getting back to King's Cross station at midnight. Which was just in time for the local pubs to close, so no quiet drink for us!

Sunday Dee and I went to Camden Market (it's fun, that market). We walked there from our place, looked around for a bit, but soon realised that the walking was more fun than the looking, especially when you don't have anything you really need to buy (got Dayna's pressie a while back; otherwise Camden would be a good place to find it!). So we caught up with Chris and Tina for lunch, then wandered back along one of the many canals to home. All the walking meant we didn't feel too bad about having a little pizza for dinner, whilst watching "I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry" on the ol' Xbox.

Good weekend, really! What has everyone else been up to?

McLaren Vale Sea and Vines

Just a quick update from us.. this long weekend was the McLaren Vale Sea and Vines festival.. basically the wineries offer seafood and desserts, live music, that kind of thing. Since it's about 15 minutes from our house we figured we had no excuse not to go check it out.
Cheryl drew the short straw and was the designated driver.. although considering all the extras she got as part of their designated driver program, i'm not sure the straw was so short after all. Each winery had something different - she got a free muffin, a brownie, a cookie, not to mention all the tea, coffee or water she could drink.. And after I paid $5 for a glass (which then cost $5 to fill at each winery) she managed to score a free one of those too.
Anyway, it was a nice way to spend a lazy public holiday. So what did the rest of you get up to?

Clare Valley

Hey all, just another quick update from me. This weekend to celebrate our anniversary Cheryl and I visited Clare Valley. It's a nice little wine area further north from Barossa, probably two hours out of Adelaide. You can see the photos here.
Clare Valley is known for it's bike trail, the Riesling trail, so in the spirit of the thing we hired a couple of bikes and went cycling. Rather than stick to the trail, which is flat and easy and boring, we went for the more exciting so-hilly-you-think-you're-going-to-die loops instead. At one point we were a bit confused as to where we were, but we found our way eventually. We probably rode about a 20km round trip, stopping for lunch at a winery along the way. We had plans to cycle to more wineries but unfortunately the weather had other plans, catching us in the start of a deluge that continued the rest of the day and most of the night. Still, we got to enjoy staying inside in front of the fire toasting the occasional marshmallow, so i'm not about to complain.
As well as the cycling we also got to Mintaro, which has a hedge maze (and giant chess!). Cheryl beat me to the centre of the maze, but I won the chess game, so we had to call it a draw.
Anyway, that was our long weekend. What about you guys?
P.S. Cows!